New Link

Tipped off by one of the guys form the Washington Home Town Forum on AR15.com, I have added a new link to the Poly-Tick-al link list: Stimulus Watch.

So you can now determine just how much of the mortgage on your kids' future is being spent on what kind of BS crap to payback ACORN and all the other thugs and crooks the Dhimmicratic Party is beholden to.

Oh, look! Browse by City and State.

368 projects in Washington State, NONE in my town, Kent. Must be more Republicans here than I realized.

The total of cost of all the projects submitted by Washington is $1,713,748,676

Oooh, they let you vote on projects. Most of them seem to be breaking even, at best; few are ahead, many are losing by a landslide...

Many chuckles in the FAQ.

2. Why these projects? Why the U.S. Conference of Mayors' report? First and foremost, the Mayor's report presented an opportunity for citizens to engage with their government. The U.S. Conference took the laudable step of posting online a complete, detailed, and well-formatted list of projects and related data.

They did? I must not have gotten that memo...

And

3. Isn't this duplicative of the administration's transparency efforts?

Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

(Their answer:)

The Obama White House has begun taking the first steps to keep its promise to be the most transparent and accountable administration in history. ...

Oh, puh-lease.

Let's look at some of the more egregious items, shall we?

$99,600 for doorbells for Laure, MS?

$375,000.00, 0 jobs, to upgrade kitchen countertops in Tallahassee, FL?

Canton, OH-based Green Environmental Solutions, LLC gets $2,500,000.00 (60 jobs) for... well, what? I dunno, doesn't say. Backing the winning horse, maybe.

Now, when we get to the bottom of the FAQ, it turns out that Porkulus does not, in fact...

...list the projects to be funded. Instead, it will appropriate money for federal grant programs, such as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) or Surface Transportation Program, which will then use the appropriated stimulus money to make grants to cities. In the case of CDBG, for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will be the agency that will decide (using a formula) which of the projects requested by the mayors will be funded.

That said, the funding Congress approves for these programs, and thus how much money cities will actually receive for their projects, may exceed or fall short of the mayors' suggestions. This means that not every project requested by the mayors will be funded. And that is why it's important for citizens to register their opinions on which projects they believe are critical and which are not. By the same token, it is also likely that many projects not yet proposed by localities (and thus not listed on this site) will receive funding via federal programs.

So, my mayor has not lined up at the trough--yet. And may not. But yours may have, or might still.

The question is, is it better to say "This whole thing stinks, leave my constituents out of it"? Or better to say "This whole thing stinks, but we have these road improvements that we need to make..."?

Presumably, Stimulus Watch will update the site as moneys get allocated--ass-you-me'ing, of course, that the process is at all transparent.

The Anointed One has already begun invoking Executive Privilege/State Secrets, you know...